In the process of all this communication creation, it's becoming more evident than ever that languages are not just mutually agreed upon rituals of vocalization. Almost without exception, they become emblems of ethnic or national identity, of personal identity, of technological prowess. And more than mere pride can be at stake: the Japanese have good reason to be concerned that English has become the de facto standard of the Internet. Language can be a symbol of profits, and of power - after all, English became a major language in India not because the Sikhs wanted to read Wordsworth's poetry, but through the military muscle of the British Empire. And those larger linguistic struggles are fought on a smaller scale every day, sometimes over stakes no larger than an unfettered joy in creating new words or in establishing a community whose language can't be understood by others. (When a skateboarder refers to a "Stalefish McTwist over the Canyon," she knows that her parents will have no idea what she means.)

Artificial languages actually exaggerate the battles over what words mean and why; because their sounds have in an overt way been chosen, the whole concept of phonemes having assigned meanings gets thrown up in the air. These languages are also often roiled by civil wars that go far beyond the debates possible with a "living" language. Esperanto was plagued for decades by apostates touting a modified version of the language called Ido. C seems to have more fiavors than Baskin-Robbins. Because there's no entrenched culture for most artificial languages, everyone has an idea of how to improve them (and a better chance than, say, the World English crowd, who would spell conceived as "konseevd").

Authors, of course, have occasionally invented their own artificial languages to round out a fictional world. Anthony Burgess cooked up Nadsat, the language of the yobbos in A Clockwork Orange, by crossing English and Russian with bits of Malay, Dutch, Gypsy, French, and Cockney; Burgess also formulated the vocabulary of grunts for the movie Quest for Fire. For her Native Tongue trilogy, sci-fi author and linguistics professor Suzette Haden Elgin created a woman's language, Láadan, that reversed the gender biases of English. For The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien employed half a dozen major languages of his own invention: the tongues of the Dwarves and the Ents appear only in small snatches, but the philology of the Elves is sufficiently highly developed for Tolkien to have written epic poems and songs in Elvish: "A Elbereth Gilthoniel/ silivren penna míriel/ o menel aglar elenath!" Tolkien even went to the trouble of inventing an old language, Westron, and then hypothesizing how it would have evolved in parallel to the English language.

Sometimes it seems people have come up with artificial languages just to entertain themselves. In Uni, all the singular nouns have exactly three letters. Monling uses one-syllable words exclusively (rendering "the language easiest to learn and use is obviously the best" as "ling 't top pai ken ad ploi, il klar top bon"). Gibson Code employs numbers rather than letters: nouns begin with 1, 2, or 3; even numbers are plural, odd singular.

One of the oddest artificial languages ever was Solrésol, invented by François Soudre in 1827. The Frenchman reasoned that since music was the universal language, the seven notes of the musical scale were the perfect building blocks for an international vocabulary. Single notes were reserved for simple words (do for "no," re for "and"), double notes for pronouns, triple notes for everyday words (do-re-la for "year"), and longer combinations for more uncommon terms. In addition, opposites were expressed whenever possible by reversing the order of the notes: do-mi-sol for "God" means that "Satan" must be sol-mi-do. Soudre tinkered with the language for 45 years, but was never able to overcome the fundamental fiaw: people would rather speak a conversation than whistle
it.